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68th IFLA Council and General Conference August 18-24, 2002 Code Number: 054-133-E Division Number: IV Professional Group: Cataloguing Joint Meeting with: - Meeting Number: 133 Simultaneous Interpretation: Yes Report on the successful AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway implementation of the FRBR and INDECS event models, and implications for other FRBR implementations http://www.austlit.edu.au Marie-Louise Ayres Project Manager, AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway 1999-2002 University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy Project Manager, MusicAustralia, 2002- National Library of Australia Kerry Kilner Project Manager, AustLit 2002-; Content Manager, 1999-2002 University of Queensland Kent Fitch Developer Project Computing Pty Ltd Annette Scarvell Content Manager, University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy 1 Abstract: This paper discusses the first major implementation of two significant new cataloguing models: IFLA's FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and event modeling (INDECS and Harmony). The paper refers briefly to the decision making processes leading to the adoption of these models, and outlines the implementation process, the benefits of the implementation, the practical and conceptual difficulties encountered in this implementation, and some observations on the future of these models in the library and information worlds. IFLA's Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records was published in 1998, and was widely accepted as providing a sound conceptual model for a new generation of bibliographic records which record and present the publishing history of information resources. The 2000 LC Cataloguing conference included a number of papers on the requirement to add 'event models' into cataloguing. FRBR and Event Modeling are powerful tools for presenting bibliographic and other information in a richly contextual environment. Implementing the models presents significant challenges but is achievable, cost effective, offers many benefits to practitioners and should be considered by a range of information providers. Keywords: Australian literature; Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records; Literary databases; Subject Gateways; XML. Introduction The International Federation of Library Associations’ Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model1 has made a major contribution to theorising bibliographic description, and the ways in which bibliographic description needs to be rethought in the Internet age. The model has also been the subject of considerable and accelerating comment2 and suggestions for amendment. This paper describes the implementation experiences of a small group which chose to implement and extend the FRBR model because it most suited a particular set of literature oriented requirements. AustLit: the Australian Literature Gateway, a web-based resource discovery service about Australian writers and writing, is the result of collaboration between eight Australian universities, each of which had developed specialist but non-standards based biographical and bibliographic databases3 and the National Library of Australia4, with the Australian Research Council5 providing development funding in 2000, 2001 and 2002.6 Development of the AustLit technical infrastructure commenced in May 2001, and by October 2002 – less than 18 months later – the AustLit service was released for public use, first as a free public trial, and, from January 2002, as a fully functional subscription service which makes a portion of its author information freely available.7 Choice and Extension of Models As the AustLit development team placed a very high value on representing the publishing histories of works, finding the International Federation of Library Associations’ 1998 Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model was very exciting.8 As FRBR aficionados will know, the FRBR model includes the concepts of: S The Work: an abstract concept (e.g. the idea of the novel Voss by Patrick White); S The Expression: a realisation of the Work (e.g. White’s original version of the novel in English or the German translation by John Stickforth); S The Manifestation: a particular embodiment of the Expression (e.g. the 1958 Kiepenheuer & Witsch publication of Stickforth’s translation of the novel Voss by Patrick White); 2 S The Item9: the individual item on a Library shelf (e.g. the copy of the 1958 Kiepenheuer & Witsch edition of the John Stickworth translation of the novel Voss by Patrick White, held at the National Library of Australia). AustLit augmented the FRBR bibliographic description model with 'event modelling': S Works have a creation event S Expressions have a realisation event S Manifestations have an embodiment event Works can be expressed one or many times, Expressions can be manifested one or many times, 10 and manifestations can result in one or many items. In the AustLit model, Works, Expressions and Manifestations all have attributes, and Creation, Realisation and Embodiment events all have attributes. AustLit has also augmented the model by incorporating the concept of SuperWork, as suggested by a number of FRBR commentators.11 Perhaps AustLit’s most significant extension12 of the FRBR model lies in its representation of agents (authors and organization). While the FRBR model and its subsequent commentators have been at pains to stress the need for agent role information in relation to works, expressions, manifestations and items, AustLit also includes: S Birth and death (or creation and cessation) events for authors and organizations, and date and place attributes for those events; S Award events (drawn from both agent and work records, with both displayed on the agent record) and award name, date and place attributes; S Gender, nationality and self-claimed cultural heritage attributes; S Arrived in Australia events and associated date attributes; S Uses alternative name attributes (for navigation of pseudonyms and other multiple names); S Archival holdings attributes. 13 Implementation: building the database Once desired functionality had been specified, it was clear that we would need to build, rather than buy, a system: there are currently no commercial systems which support all the data models, or which support the complex relationship concepts of Topic Mapping14 in database design. All AustLit entities, including events and attributes, are topics, and relationships between those entities are also topics: the AustLit Gateway includes more than 3.3 million topics. The basic design documents relating to our custom built system are publicly available at the website. 15 Although the topics and their relationships are stored in conventional (but unusually highly normalised) relational database tables, the system converts the data into a common XML format at an early stage of output processing. From this common XML format, information is transformed into the desired final output format (typically HTML) using XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language). The XML representation contains enough information to generate alternative encodings such as MARC or to augment the HTML with Dublin Core or RDF metadata.16 With the exception of the Oracle database – which our University licence made available to us – all other software used is open source. AustLit runs on a Sun Microsystems Blade-1000 workstation, under the Solaris operating system. At the outset of the implementation phase, we believed that the major risks lay in the complexity of designing a database to accommodate the FRBR, INDECS and Harmony models along with all the multitudinous relationships we had mapped out, and the likely performance of a highly normalised (i.e. consisting of some millions of ‘topics’) database. As it turned out, these were not the major hurdles we had envisaged, and the development team has been very pleased with the design outcome and database 3 performance. Database design work commenced in July 2000, and by March 2001 the database had been designed, most data had been converted, the essential elements of the maintenance interface had been developed, and the AustLit staff from eight institutions around Australia were trained and commenced work in the new system. Implementation: Converting the data Having said that, there certainly have been issues in implementing the FRBR model and the other elements of the AustLit model which intersect with it, such as representations of events and agents. The major implementation issues had little to do with the models we chose: most of these issues would have arisen whatever data models and standards were chosen. We substantially under-anticipated the risk which lay in migrating a range of existing non-standards based databases to the new structure. Every new database brought new problems and we were not able to reapply previous conversion solutions! We also encountered significant issues relating to interpretation of the FRBR and the pragmatics of implementation. The model was clearly written with a ‘whole monograph’ emphasis (although the model demonstrates that it can be used for other types of works, such as performances). AustLit’s implementation was complicated because only a small portion of AustLit records fit this model, as AustLit includes a wide variety of individual non-monograph items (eg. individual poems, reviews and articles), and represents complex clusters of items such as poem sequences and author series. However, as would be expected of any catalogue or index, the overwhelming